Peter Carey - Bliss

Adrian Clunes's high-pitched laughter filtered through the shut door.

Harry Joy sat on a low chair in his dressing gown and watched his girl. She was tall and straight and everything about her was vertical, even her profile, which was almost flat, interrupted only by the bump of her nose and lift of her lips. She was, from instant to instant, severely plain then astonishingly beautiful, and her most beautiful and obvious feature was her very large, almost impossibly large, brown eyes, which glistened with what Harry, entranced, chose to believe was suspicion. He was not wrong. She was like a cat that has come in a window. He knew her. He knew how she felt when she walked across the room touching things with her curious, long-fingered hands, stroking lamps, feeling fabrics, smiling absently. She was someone with a notebook in her hand. He felt that if he had jumped up from his chair she would have bolted, left in one silky movement: the leap of the cat from chair to window ledge.

'This your wallet?' It was sitting on top of the bar amongst some melting ice.

'Yes.'

'Your credit card in here?' She had a funny shy, sly smile.

'Is it the Diners Club?'

'American Express,' he said contrarily. He let her touch the wallet, open it, remove the card. He trusted her suspicion.

'Don't worry about me if I talk too much,' she said. 'I've just got all this city shit in my system. It makes me speedy.'

'Are you from the country?'

'No,' she said sharply. She brought a bulky credit card machine from her handbag. 'I'm not from anywhere.'

He smiled.

She smiled back, but uncertainly. 'I'm not into any funny stuff. No Golden Showers.'

'I don't want any funny stuff.'

'Change your mind, it's O.K. I'll just call the office, they'll send someone else.'

'It's O.K.,' he said. 'I don't want anything funny.'

'Better to get all that up front.'

'Cards on the table,' he teased her.

'All hanging out.'

'Et cetera,' he said.

She laughed, and ruined her third Diners Club form.

'Fuck it,' she said.

But she got the fourth one right and brought it to Harry to sign.

'Well,' she said, 'that's that.'

She went back to the bar and turned her back to him. She dropped a spoon and picked it up hurriedly.

'You wonder what I'm doing, don't you?'

Harry shrugged. She had a Band-aid on her leg, under her stocking.

'It's not what you think.'

'I didn't think anything.'

'It's not cocaine.'

'What is it?'

'Honey.' She held up a little jar about as big as an expensive shoe cream. She raised an eyebrow and he saw in the twist of her pale pink lips a drollness – this was a face that could be anything. She took a teaspoon full of honey and held it up before she ate it.

'This is very powerful honey. You shouldn't have more than a teaspoonful.' She screwed the lid back on and dropped it back into her bag.

'What does it do?'

'You people,' she said. Which people did she mean? 'You people are amazing. Look at my eyes. No, come here. Come over to the mirror.'

She held out her hand and he stood up. She led him to the vanity table where, sitting side by side, they put their faces up to the mirror.

'Put your face closer to mine,' she ordered. 'So you can see your eyes and my eyes.'

Harry looked into his dull grey eyes and looked at her glistening dark ones, the iris of such a dark blue it was almost black, the whites perfectly white.

'Your eyes are beautiful,' he said sincerely, looking at the reflection of her solemn face.

'Honey,' she said. She leant back from the mirror and looked at him critically.

'What do you eat?'

Harry tried to tell her.

'Christ,' she said in amazement. 'Let me look at your eyes. Hold still.'

She held his head and peered closely into his eyes while Harry was overwhelmed by the aromatics of her powerful honey. 'You eat a lot of salt,' she said.

'It's all there, in your eyes, years of salt. But you have very nice eyelashes,' she said: 'And you look a little like... turn that way… Krishna.'

'So I've been told.'

'You know who Krishna is?'

'Certainly.'

'You do?'

'Yes.'

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. 'Well,' she said, 'would you like some of my honey?'

She brought the spoon and fed it to him. 'This is leatherwood honey,' she said. 'The Rolls Royce of Honeys, from the leatherwood tree. Are you in a hurry to fuck me, or what, because if you want to, I'm you know, free any time.' She held out her hands, indicating the presence of a body. 'I guess this talk isn't very erotic for you.'

'More than you think,' he said rolling the honey around the inside of his mouth.

'Do you have lots of whores?' she asked him.

'A few.'

'Well you're lucky today,' she grinned, 'because you have struck a gifted amateur.'

What Honey Barbara said was not really true: she was not, strictly speaking, an amateur. Whoring was her one com-mercial talent and once a year, for two months, she came down to the city and signed up with the Executive Escort Agency. She felt as ambivalent about it as she felt about the city itself, sometimes looking back on it with nostalgia and forgetting that daily life was normally spent in fear and homesickness.

Sometimes she liked her clients, but usually she didn't and when things got really bleak she would spend her time, against all her principles, doped to the eyeballs so she didn't feel a thing.

But this was her first commercial fuck of the year and he wasn't fat and flabby and when he got undressed she wouldn't get that unpleasant feeling that comes, like a sour gas, from bulging white mesh and nylon socks. Besides, he looked like Krishna.

She saw his passiveness and knew he was easy to handle, that she could walk away from him and it would be O.K. or she could take him, right now, and spread him out, like that, and have him lie, like so, on the floor, and devour him, first of all with her mouth and that there, at least, he would not smell too bad for a city man, and he would not fuck like someone running for a bus.

He was just a businessman, but she felt at home enough with him to put her heart into her work for an hour or two while she tangled her long legs with him, and when he brought his big moustache against her face, she did not mind kissing him.

*

She would never know, if she lived to be a hundred, how a big glob of come could be worth three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars was enough to live on for six weeks. It was a roof. A water tank. A stove. It was thirty avocado trees. Half a horse.

'Was I worth three hundred dollars?' She snuggled into him. He looked pleased with himself. He had a crinkle in the corner of his eye.

'Every cent,' he said.

'Would you see me again?'

'Well,' he said, 'what do you think?' He was a thin man with a roly-poly voice. He was so foreign she couldn't imagine what his thoughts might be. Even his clothes felt foreign. She could not understand someone with a silk shirt.

'Oh,' she rubbed her head. 'I don't feel a thing.'

'Nothing?'

'Not a thing.'

'You must feel something ,' he insisted, touching the nipple on her small breast. They both watched it grow erect.

'Something.' She pulled the sheet over the offending nipple. 'It's my Karma. You don't know what Karma is, do you?' she grinned. 'You know you look like Krishna. But you don't know what Karma is?'

He bowed his head humbly.

'Karma means that what you do in one life affects what happens to you in the next. Maybe I was a whore in the last life, so this life I don't like fucking much. It means if you're Good in this life you'll have a better time in the next one. Hey,' she hit his arm, 'are you taking the piss out of me?'

He was doing an imitation of a staring man. 'If you're Good?' he said.